Election Hinges on Peace Talks With Guerrillas Amid Fears Demobilized Fighters Will Turn to Crime.
On a recent morning, a 20-year-old member of a gang here finished his breakfast of eggs and fried bananas, called his mother to say hello, and then set off to gun down two strangers.
“All the victims say, ‘Please don’t kill me,’ and scream and cry,” said Pedrito, an assassin for La Empresa, or The Company, a gang terrorizing this dilapidated Pacific port city. “But I simply do my job.”
The grisly work of such young assassins and the numbing violence here has helped fuel doubts that peace negotiations between President Juan Manuel Santos and a Marxist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, will end warfare in the country.
The skeptics point to young men like Pedrito, whose life of violence is a byproduct of the last major demobilization, when 30,000 men from an anti-guerrilla paramilitary organization disarmed. As the last fighters lay down their guns in 2006 after a three-year disarmament, the government of then-President Álvaro Uribe pledged the former combatants would find jobs and even start small businesses.
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